The ActiveX control does not contain the actual worm, according to McAfee Security. Instead, it creates and runs a VBScript on the system, which downloads and executes the worm from one of a list of IP addresses. According to McAfee, as of 06:45 PST on March 18, "The majority of the 590 IP addresses seen have been closed down. At the time of writing, 39 were still responding."

Antivirus companies have become out of sync with each other with respect to Bagle variants. Panda Software refers to the new ones as Bagle.P, Bagle.Q and Bagle.R., with Bagle.Q as the most serious one. Panda reports that the worm "infects PE files [which are standard Windows .EXE programs], downloads a file from the Internet and ends processes belonging to security applications." Kaspersky Labs Int.s analysis of the code says that the program attempts to infect PE files but fails to do so due to an error in the code.
According to Trend Micro Inc.s analysis of the worm, it also spreads through the conventional e-mail attachment mechanism, as well as through peer-to-peer networks and shared folders. Symantec Corp. calls the three worms Beagle.R, Beagle.S and Beagle.T but did not have analysis ready for them as of this storys posting.
The ActiveX infection mechanism requires that the e-mail client permit ActiveX controls to run in HTML e-mail. Microsoft e-mail clients have disallowed this feature by default for several years.
All of the major antivirus companies claim to have detection definitions available for the worms. However, they havent necessarily prepared disinfection routines.

Larry Seltzer has been writing software for and English about computers ever since,much to his own amazement,he graduated from the University of Pennsylvania in 1983.

He was one of the authors of NPL and NPL-R, fourth-generation languages for microcomputers by the now-defunct DeskTop Software Corporation. (Larry is sad to find absolutely no hits on any of these +products on Google.) His work at Desktop Software included programming the UCSD p-System, a virtual machine-based operating system with portable binaries that pre-dated Java by more than 10 years.

For several years, he wrote corporate software for Mathematica Policy Research (they're still in business!) and Chase Econometrics (not so lucky) before being forcibly thrown into the consulting market. He bummed around the Philadelphia consulting and contract-programming scenes for a year or two before taking a job at NSTL (National Software Testing Labs) developing product tests and managing contract testing for the computer industry, governments and publication.

In 1991 Larry moved to Massachusetts to become Technical Director of PC Week Labs (now eWeek Labs). He moved within Ziff Davis to New York in 1994 to run testing at Windows Sources. In 1995, he became Technical Director for Internet product testing at PC Magazine and stayed there till 1998.

Since then, he has been writing for numerous other publications, including Fortune Small Business, Windows 2000 Magazine (now Windows and .NET Magazine), ZDNet and Sam Whitmore's Media Survey.